


milkweed

by desvelo



Category: VALORANT (Video Game)
Genre: Budding Love, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:33:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29776227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desvelo/pseuds/desvelo
Summary: In those days I couldn’t understand. Didn’t you know how much I needed to make my soul known to you? You hunters have that sixth sense, something pulsing within you to the heartbeat of your prey. When you looked at me in the hallway couldn’t you feel it flutter?
Relationships: Phoenix/Sova (VALORANT)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	milkweed

How long it’s been to get here, through the trees and the tundras to get here, your monarch butterfly alighting home. 

You were part of the Protocol when I joined and you eyed this new arrival with more suspicion than even Cypher did. Drinking overbrewed tea in the lounge you’d read slim volumes and cover the name on the spine when I tried to say hello. I’d see you stare at me from the spot in the courtyard where you and Sage would trade whispers, tracing my outline and turning back to your conversation. I sat on the other side of the building and listened to the bee-eaters pree. 

Sage too was cold though not so hard to crack as you. I tried to get to know her and it didn’t work until one morning early I said something I didn’t think was funny and she laughed and laughed and the wall was down. After that she told me how she admired your religious devotion to your work. You had a spirit meant for monastic life, she said. One day soon she would tell you more about the White-Robed Guanyin. She stopped talking when we heard your footsteps like rain in the hall. Then I was the one staring, stunned how your graceful asymmetry overtook the room when you nodded to her and walked on. 

In those days I couldn’t understand. Didn’t you know how much I needed to make my soul known to you? You hunters have that sixth sense, something pulsing within you to the heartbeat of your prey. When you looked at me in the hallway couldn’t you feel it flutter? 

I told Sage what I’d been thinking. She knew already though she couldn’t relate (the Bodhisattva is my beloved). A whine in my voice I asked if it was really that obvious (yes, Phoenix). While we stood pensive a moth beat itself against the windowpane ahead. You think enough for him to figure? (With him you never know.) 

I brought you tea when you read. It was not to your preference, thick with milk and honey, but you gave it a cautious sip and told me you were getting through Nabokov. He wrote this one in English first, his second language, then translated it to Russian because only he could do so to his standards. It was thoughtful and precise. And he collected butterflies, did I know? I’m yours to pose and pin. 

I wasn’t sure how to kiss you. I had never kissed a man before and I had barely kissed a woman so I couldn't fathom the plush of your lips under mine, figure out if it was even possible for us to come together like that. I felt like we had a problem of geometry, some wrong combination of faces and edges so we could never press flush against each other. And even if we could I didn’t know if we wanted to get that close to one another’s facets so I resorted instead to asking if I could borrow your copy of Pale Fire. You were more apologetic than usual. It was in translation. 

There was a time after a mission when I saw you crossing through the lounge and exhaustion weighed down your limbs, your shoulders sloping, your hair limp and oily, ash grey. Even a hunter can't take life forever. You didn’t look at me then but I think you watched me out of the corner of your brimming eyes. You let me see you like that. 

Somehow I got my own copy of that book. I sat in the lounge with more-cream-than-tea puzzling out the story of Aunt Maud. I asked if you knew what her whole deal was but you had already moved onto your next book, a compendium of sutras from Sage, and those few of the 999 lines escaped you. Was she the one who painted? You leaned over my shoulder to look at the part about “(Moon, Moonrise, Moor, Moral).” Your fingers gripping the chair touched ever so slightly the back of my head. Jett dashed in and you ran your hand through my hair in your rush to stand straight again. You never got to tell me what you thought the poem meant. 

When we did kiss I didn’t think about geometry. I gave up on the book before the end of canto two, bent bookmark flagging feebly my inability to make it more than a few pages in. I had closed it on a line that Nabokov wrote about you or maybe me: “difficult, morose, but still my darling.” That phrase and my thought about edges and vertices and everything else in the world flew out of my mind when we lifted our heads and opened our eyes from our moment of breathlessness and you were smiling wider than I had seen marked by lips that I now knew. It was dizzying! We watched a tern pluck a shimmering beetle out of the air. 

On our days off I’d have a cigarette on the patio - bad habit of course but sometimes it’s what there is to do. Out there I rolled a spark around in my palm. When you joined me I said I hoped you didn’t mind the smoke and for the love of all that is holy don’t tell Sage. You laughed and snatching the cig from my fire-warmed fingers you took a drag and blew grey tendrils into the clean air. 

The first time we slept together you were my bastion. You kept me tethered in our quilt-wrapped alcove even as you graced my thigh with otherworldly fingers. For a time I was lost out in the gemmy void, kaleidoscope diamonds patterning my vision in the darkness of your hot breath, yet you brought me home with your dulcet kiss. More than anything I remember beneath my bony hands the fishbone of your back, the muscle of your neck against the muscle of my arms when I looped them around you to keep as close as I could. 

Under the banner of a new day the sight of a butterfly copper-pink by the window got a line of Pale Fire stuck in my head. She on the sill was an omen; I was overcome with worry. I worried that I had done it wrong, clumsy and selfish. I worried that it was too right, that if I had to be far from you I would collapse and need would drive you away. I worried that in the night our souls had gotten too close and my fire had singed you, curled your edges. “The wonder lingers and the shame remains” - he looked into me when he wrote that. Is it possible to live beneath the crush of a love so great? 

I saw you cross through the lounge after your shower, steam curling off your scrubbed-red skin. This time I don’t think you saw me and your purity when you think you’re alone is so apparent, rich and deep, that I had to stop looking. 

Sage asked me what had happened between us. I might be bold but not enough to tell her what we’d done together. And had I had the guts to spill it wouldn’t be the truth; this was all my wrong, nothing to do with you. In the warm night I was in love, and it was love that made me like this, afraid to speak, afraid of losing hold. I didn’t have anything to say to her. She patted me light on the back, told me to look deep for clarity. We were all guessing. 

I can’t believe how long I made you wait. Each minute that passed my fear grew, tearing at my throat, and it made it harder to breathe, harder to try. But after days of darkness one of us came to the other - I don’t know who to whom, maybe you to me, out in the lounge in the sunless morning. We had our standoff. The look in your eyes was the same as it had been when I got here, unflinching and hawklike. I said I was sorry. You could see into me, my confession beaming more than nakedness does: a monarch butterfly follows the compass of the sun across the whole of a continent and I love you more than even that. You to me are a star to a bug. All I wanted was to come back to you. 

Our hearts revealed we floated then. I got to remember your kiss, remember the lightness of your hands, brush of your cheek. I got to remember your forgiveness, your angel mercy, remember that behind your steel is silken, darling, remember how you love me too. We are home again in the chrysalis of one another's arms. Here we are roosting. Here we are weightless.


End file.
